Reply to New York Times on the miracles of Universal Pre-K in DC

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Reply to "New York Times on the miracles of Universal Pre-K in DC"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Exactly. Even the European countries with the best social systems don't provide stipends to SAHPs (only for the first year, when there is paid maternity leave). But they do provide subsidized daycare, not just pre-school. They prefer lower income parents to stay in the workforce rather than collecting welfare and staying home. My brother pays around $250/month for full-time daycare in Berlin, but if you are really low income, it is free.[/quote]

Those countries are all massively broke (except Norway, which breaks even due to its oil production), and the high cost of their taxes and other government interventions has made young adult unemployment and underemployment epidemic, with the result that middle income people are not having kids at all. The average birthrate is 1.5 per woman, and if immigrants are taken out of that number, it is close to or below 1 per woman for the native born depending on the county.  The very high cost of these social programs is not, on average, helping moms and kids; it is leading to fewer women becoming moms / fewer kids.  I do not understand why this is seen as a positive, pro-woman, or pro-kid thing.

It would be lovely if you could spend money on families without also using high tax rates to take money away from families to fund that spending. Unless you are planning to strike a North Sea oil gusher (Norway), no one can do this. The statistics are grim: more spending, means less freedom for individuals' spending decisions, and also means that educated people who get hit by the taxes (since they are the earners) don't have as many kids, and often have no kids.  That is a social disaster.  
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Actually, Germany (which is what I was thinking of in my post) is doing pretty well economically, in many ways better than the US in recent years.[/quote]

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